Friday, 2 November 2007

Friday morning

Actually I was expecting today to be Saturday. I spent the whole of yesterday (which of course was Thursday) thinking that it was Friday. This happens from time to time, of course - but not usually for a whole day. Anyway, this morning things are mentally back in the right place again, at least to the same extent that they usually are.

The Swirly Scarf is rolling along nicely. Here it is sitting in the sunshine looking rather bleached out - it really is going to be extremely pretty.

At the moment I am part way through casting off 900 stitches, and with Kidsilk Haze and Addi needles it is slow going indeed. The Addis are perfect for the rest of the scarf, but the KSH wants to slide right off them all the time, so I have to be careful. It is worth the time and effort though, it looks beautiful. My husband stopped and looked this morning, and commented that the edging looked like some sort of mist.....

After this cast-off is finished, then I shall be picking up along the cast-on edge and working the other half of the scarf in exactly the same way.

I had enough yarn in the first skein of Baby Alpaca 4ply to work just 4 extra rows - a single row takes something like 9 or 10 metres of yarn at that stage of the scarf. So it has added a little extra width, but not a lot. The garter stitch fabric is just lovely - extremely soft of course and interestingly textured.

The picot tiger socks haven't been picked up at all, I'm afraid, despite the best of intentions. Maybe I shall have to revise my acceptable number of WIPs downwards. We shall see, as NOvember progresses.

What else - Ravelry, which just gets better and better.

Yesterday evening I finally braved Flickr for the first time, and discovered that actually it is all extremely easy. I have uploaded what photos I have of my finished projects - not so many, as I really only started keeping any sort of record when I started this blog - and also of my works in progress. This is going to be even more useful than I had thought - I keep finding new features and getting sidetracked, though.

The areas where I have barely broken the surface, however, are the queue and the stash. The idea is that one photographs the stash, item by item, and notes all the details, number of skeins and so forth. And also that one itemises planned projects as well - this is the queue.

The problem however, is that I only buy yarn with a specific project in mind. So my not-insubtantial stash in its entirety is really one giant queue. I have had a spreadsheet for a while now which kept track of which yarn was intended for which project, and also identified where the pattern was to be found, ie in which Rowan magazine, or which issue of Interweave Knits - but recently I haven't kept it up to date.

But the number of lines in my spreadsheet - which roughly corresponds to the number of projects in the queue/stash of course - is something of the order of 150, excluding sock yarn. We will not speak about the sock yarn, there is quite a lot of it.

I simply do not think that I can face photographing all of this, not at the moment, anyway. So I believe that I will settle for adding things to the queue gradually, and only posting pictures when they reach that stage.

It would be worth the trouble if I ever did get round to doing the whole thing, though.